Annales d’histoire économique

The Annales School – The historians, mainly French, grouped around the series of journals descended from the “Annales d’histoire économique et sociale,” founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. These reviews eschew histoire événementielle and its focus on key dates and great men, instead concentrating on the longue durée, best exemplified by Fernand Braudel’s magisterial histories of the Mediterranean region, as well as on mentalités. Annales historians also worked on the seemingly small (“What We Can Learn From 18th Century Tolls on the Seine” or “The Price of Papyrus in Greek Antiquity”) which they used to demonstrate the larger issues in the history and development of societies. Perhaps the group’s most famous book is Emmanuel Leroy Ladurie’s “Montaillou, Promised Land of Error” (1978), a close examination of a Cathar village in the 13th-14th centuries.